Sydney experienced severe storms over the weekend, which could have contributed to the outage.
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An outage of a swathe of Amazon’s cloud services in its Sydney region hit Australian businesses today.
During Sydney’s wild weather on Saturday and Sunday, a power issue caused an outage at cloud provider Amazon Web Services, bringing several big websites and streaming services – along with their associated apps – screeching to a halt.
A power outage at AWS caused issues across dozens of services.
The Amazon Dashboard, which shows how the service is operating across different continents, shows issues in Sydney. A small number of instances remained offline after the outage due to physical server hardware being “adversely affected” by the loss of power, but the major end user-facing services – including Foxtel, Domain, Domino’s and Nine Entertainment’s streaming service Stan – were up and running throughout Sunday.
They said in a statement that the EC2 API calls in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region had experienced an increase in the error rates and latencies and had also encountered some delays in the propagation of instance state data which could be in the affected Availability Zone. An hour later, a “power event” was cited as the culprit, with power restored 45 minutes after that and periodic updates appearing until a message at 0443 PDT on June 5, saying the majority of the instances had been fixed.
The power outage occurred within a single availability zone, and shortly afterwards AWS reported that new instances of the affected services were successfully being launched within the other zones.
A Commonwealth Bank spokeswoman said the bank was not aware of any systemic issues, but some individuals may be experiencing intermittent issues with other eftpos machines.
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In a separate outage on Sunday, customers of Westpac, Commonwealth Bank and MeBank reported that their EFTPOS and credit cards were not working, leaving some customers stranded attempting to pay for their weekly shopping. The issues hit various AWS services, including ElastiCache, CloudFormation and Database Migration Service.
